Watercolour Experiments

Here are some sketches of my Mr Big character, where i have used the light box to trace the outline of the character in pencil and repeated this 5 times to give me many different drawings to experiment with. I decided to use watercolour as i wanted to see the effect it would give to my drawing, and whether this was the desired look for my children's book. In the first image (top left) i drew out the character and went over it with waterproof fine liner, to ensure that i would not lose the detail that i had already put into the drawing. Then, making sure to be fairly neat and accurate, I used watercolour to add colour into the drawing, using colours that are usual of what a character in a book would look like. For the 4 other images i tried to make each one look different to the previous. I used 'earth' colours, but to make it look more chaotic than the first image i used a different technique. Firstly, after drawing out the image, i used a large brush and added water over it, and then added the watercolour. This meant that the different colours merged together, again, giving a washed effect which is something i am thinking about doing for my children's book. I used this technique for the next two drawings, but used different colours. For the third drawing (middle left) I used complementary colours of purple and yellow to create a character that would look unusual to children reading the book. As it doesn't look very vibrant I will probably put it into Photoshop and change the saturation and contrast to ensure it gives the effect I want it to have. For the fourth  drawing (middle right) I wanted to see how the technique i was using would look with different gradients of one colour, I decided to use brown as this would look the best on the cover of a children's book. It gave the exact look I expected as each section has merged together. Similarly to the previous drawing, it would look much better one put into Photoshop, where I can change the contrast, saturation and levels of the image, to ensure it looks the best as it possibly can. For the last drawing I decided not to use the same technique as the last ones, to see what type of image i could create. For this image I got the colour I wanted onto my brush and placed the colour to the page, being careful to make sure I only went over it once. There were some parts that merged together when it was drying, but I think this gave a nice effect to the drawing. Like the others it will look much better once put into Photoshop and edited slightly.